The present invention relates to translation of items in programs, and more specifically to automated generation and identification of screenshots for translation reference of items in programs.
During software localization, a portion of the software may be processed for adapting a software product to the linguistic, cultural and technical requirements of a target market. Translators are often given to-be-translated material but are not given corresponding context information. Applications (especially those originally written for the English market) are very often not ready for the translation: sentences are broken into separate strings put together by code instructions, strings are reused in a different context (for example fax as a noun and fax as a verb) and application functional content is not separated from the code (for example error messages are often located as string constants or variables in the code).
Currently, user-visible strings such as labels, messages, contextual help, etc. are extracted into resource bundles, and these resource bundles can be delivered to translators to perform translation separately and in parallel to the development of product functions in each component. However, without the translators seeing the actual product graphical user interface (GUI) and the context in the panel in which user-visible strings are referring to, the translated strings might not perfectly represent the original meaning, or can cause confusion for the end users. To improve the translation quality, translators perform another check for all the translated strings in the panels once the function of the software is fully implemented. As a result, the product delivery time is dependent on post translation verification by the translators.